Findings show that the cloud is perceived by nearly half of the respondents to be a viable option for disaster recovery, however many have yet to overcome security and reliability concerns. The cost of information technology (IT) downtime is still elusive – 54% cannot quantify the cost of an hour of downtime. At the application level, availability has never been more critical. Microsoft Exchange and SQL ranked No. 1 and No. 2 respectively as the top mission-critical applications. The details of the results follow.

Disaster Recovery and the Cloud

The cloud is gaining traction. Forty-four percent of respondents consider the cloud to be a viable option for disaster recovery. Thirty percent do not, and 26% are unsure.

For those who do not consider the cloud to be viable for DR, the majority (34%) say it is due to their lack of confidence in cloud security.

Yet, 72% of those surveyed run mission-critical applications on virtual machines.

The Cost and Impact of Downtime

Twenty-three percent of respondents have had an IT outage for more than one full business day, and only five percent report never experiencing an outage.

Hardware or software problems cause most of the IT outages (43% of respondents), while others reported power or datacenter outages (35%), natural disasters (8%), human error (6%) and other (8%)

Downtime is painful, and workers require instant fixes. Almost half (47%) of the IT personnel surveyed received immediate notification of downtime. Thirty-six percent were alerted when people tried to access an application, and only 17% were not aware of an outage.

Surprisingly, 54% of respondents do not know the hourly cost of downtime. Of those who do, 16% rated it greater than $10,000, 7% rated it between $5,001 and $10,000, and the rest rated it under $5,000.

Downtime frequency during the past year ranged from zero (31%) to once (32%), twice (21%) and three or more times (16%).

Application Availability

Seventy-six percent of surveyed organizations identify their most critical applications. In order of priority, respondents ranked them as follows:

Neverfail Quote Bob Roudebush, vice president of marketing for Neverfail "We're in the business of helping companies ensure uptime. In one regard, this data confirms some of the things we already know – employees demand constant access to the applications they need to do their jobs, and the cloud is the shiny new toy that businesses want to leverage once they feel more confident in its capabilities. Most surprising though, is the lack of awareness regarding the cost of downtime. Given the importance companies place on identifying and maintaining access to their most critical applications, we were shocked that more than half don't know the true cost of downtime."

About Neverfail

Neverfail is a leading global software company providing affordable data protection, high availability, and disaster recovery solutions focused on keeping users productive. Neverfail's software solutions enable users to remain continuously connected to the live software application irrespective of hardware, software, operating system, or network failures. Neverfail's mission of eliminating application downtime for the end user delivers the assurance of business continuity, removes the commercial and IT management costs associated with system downtime, and enables the more productive use of IT resources. Neverfail, a US Managed Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is a consistent and active early adopter participant and contributor in all mission-critical Microsoft applications. It is also a member of the Microsoft SQL Server Always On Alliance. More information can be found at www.neverfailgroup.com.